I am thinking of having a weekly online developers live discussion or chatting. This can be done during the weekend in the evening or something. Anyway, the idea is to share knowledge between the developers and discuss interesting topics.

I am not yet sure where the chatting/discussion should take place? Any suggestions?

Podcasting is hard! I created this one which only runs a few minutes in 1-2 hours :(. Well, practice makes you perfect! In this podcast I introduced FIT to developers and how it helps to bridge the communication gap between the developers and the clients. The podcast is hosted on www.KoffeeKoder.com. Check out the page below: http://www.koffeekoder.com/... ......

Sometime back I wrote an article on how to create a multiple choice exam using NHibernate. The article was supposed to be multi-part series but I got stuck in work and what not. Anyway, very soon I will complete that article and also a new article in which I will descibe how to make multiple choice exams using DLINQ. I have started working on the DLINQ article. Here are the class diagrams of the Repositories. And here are few tests to get started: [Test] [RollBack] public void CanAddQuestionsToExam() ......

I just started playing around with Visual Studio.NET 2008 Team Suite and found out that the Add method for the DLINQ Table<T> has been replaced by InsertOnSubmit(Entity e). Although the name InsertOnSubmit makes more sense few people might have to go back to their code and tutorials and change the Add to InsertOnSubmit.

I have talked about DLINQ and layering issue and I think SubSonic also suffers from the same problem. I used SubSonic during the long weekend and found out that it has rich entity class modal which also does the work of calling the DAL layer. Now, the question is that how can you make your class library portable. If you export your class library as a DLL you will also need to include the SubSonic.dll which is fine. But what if you want the users of your library to make use of your methods and NOT ......

Here is the final result of the poll: Reading Books 73Participating in Forums 40Reading Other's Code 58Teaching 15Speaking 11Code, Code and Code! 106 As, you can see "Code, Code and Code!" wins by a long margin followed by Reading books. I will have to partially agree with the result. My idea is that if you want to become a better developer then you need to emphasize on more than one technique. Code, code and code makes sense since practice makes perfect but apart from practice you also need good ......

Yesterday I had fun trying out Fit and Fitnesse. For those who are not familiar with Fit and Fitnesse, Fit stands for Framework for Integrated Test and Fitnesse is a tool to run Fit tests. The idea behind Fit is to create a communication bridge between the developers and the managers or the clients. For this we need some interface which can be understood by a non-technical person. Fit handles this problem by creating a HTML table interface. The table can be created in Word, Excel or manually. Take ......

I have started a new poll on www.KoffeeKoder.com which is about how to become a better developer. Visit www.KoffeeKoder.com and cast your vote. The poll control will be displayed on the right side of the screen.

I just published my latest article on www.koffeekoder.com. I talked about how you can get started with test driven development and how you take design decisions when writing tests. You can read the complete article using the link below:

I am looking for passionate people to write intermediate or advanced .NET articles. Your article will be published on www.koffeekoder.com and GridViewGuy. Here are the details:The article can be about ASP.NET, SQL SERVER, C#, JavaScript, WPF, Silverlight, WCF, WebServices and other .NET related technologies. We pay $10 - $15 per article through the paypal account. The rates will increase with the passage of time and the quality of the articles provided. This is a long term contract and the good author ......

I have just added Ajax enabled feedback features to www.koffeekoder.com website. Now, you can click the "Reply" button which will open a small window where you can submit a feedback. The window opens using a "FadeIn" effect using the JQuery library. I hope you like this feature :)

Well, that was a very strong statement but atleast DLINQ won the Weekly Poll. The poll started a week ago (duh weekly poll) in which I asked "Which ORM framework would you prefer?". The choices includes DLINQ, NHibernate, Active Record, SubSonic and few other ORM frameworks. DLINQ collected 48 votes while NHiberate was second with 36 votes. In case you are wondering where the poll was held, it was held on GridViewGuy. So, let's talk more about the results of the poll. Why DLINQ won? I think the main ......

Hey everyone, I am proud to announce the release of KoffeeKoder.com. The website hosts technical articles covering all aspects of the .NET framework. I hope the website will serve you as an informative source to further maximize your knowledge and skills. The appreciation I have gained through GridViewGuy.com over the years has enabled me to pursue my passion in ASP.Net developing and I hope to deliver the same level of professionalism in KoffeeKoder.com. Wake up and smell the code! www.koffeekoder.com ......

I have updated the SharpCacheSessionManager so now it includes creation time, expiration time and the file dependencies of the cached item. For those who are not familiar with SharpCacheSessionManager it is a HttpHandler to view the items/entries in the Cache, Session and Application objects. You can view the screen shot of the SharpCacheSessionManager in the image below: [Download SharpCacheSessionManager] ......

JQuery is a JavaScript library is created to make the life of JavaScript developers easy. Let's check out some of the cool features of the JQuery library. The $() function is one of the coolest features of JQuery. If you want to assign the click event to all the anchor tags on the page then you can simply do the following: $("a").click(function() { alert('The link is clicked'); }); If I am interested in a particular element then I can use the following code: $("link1").click(function() { alert('The ......

I use a 17 inche display with 1920 X 1200 resolution (laptop). Now, to be honest 17 inche is freaking too big for a laptop. I think the best size is 15 inche. I use VS.NET 2005 as my IDE and the white background burns up my brain cells (a few that are left). I came across this post "Join the dark side of Visual Studio" and thought I might join the dark side. Well, I am happy to say that I have joined the dark side. Here is a screen shot of my IDE: I dare you to join the dark side :) ......

I was to a developer buddy of mine and he suggested that your site (www.gridviewguy.com) should be renamed to TheDotNetGuy since the website host articles NOT only about the GridView control. I already have the domain TheDotNetGuy and I think it will redirect you to the GridViewGuy. Do, you think it is a good idea? Keep in mind that the domain GridViewGuy will still be valid!

I think my wife is also transforming into a GEEK (not computer geek!). She has recently started her own blog on www.blogger.com. If you are interested in reading something non-technical and extremely interesting then browse through her posts.

When I was creating the Polling module I need to fire the server method right after registering the callback method. I thought this would be simple as I just needed to call the method right after registering. Well, not really let's check out the code below: private void RegisterCallbacks() { string sbReference = Page.ClientScript.GetCallba... "arg", "ReceiveServerData", "context"); string cbScript = String.Empty; // check if the script is already registered or not if (!Page.ClientScript.IsClien... ......

Agile Houston invites Venkat Subramaniam to give a session on FIT (Framework for Integrated Test). I have never attended the Agile Houston group before but I think it will be a blast. So, if you are in Houston area be sure to visit this session. You can find more information using the link below:

A week ago I started a poll in which I asked "Which Ajax framework do you mostly use?" with the following choices: ASP.NET AJAX AJAX PRO Library Anthem.NET Plain XmlHttp Object The winner by a long margin was the MS ASP.NET AJAX. Surprising! not really. MS ASP.NET AJAX framework might not be the slickest framework in the market but without any doubt it is one of the easiest one to use. The real power lies in the UpdatePanel control which can update a portion of the page using client side postbacks. ......

Here is the first Screencast in flash. I hope you like it and I hope the video and audio quality is good. http://www.gridviewguy.com/... For those of you who like it I am willing to put together bunch of those but and big but... I will need a Flash SWF hosting server. So, if anyone knows a free hosting server that can host flash files and gives me direct link to the file then it will be super great. The above video is pretty large aprox 10MB. Also, I noted that in some ......

AJAX is a superb technology but it has some sharp edges. Here are couple of things that I came across when developing AJAX enabled applications. Let's say that you have a page which sends request to the server using ASP.NET 2.0 Client Callbacks (Behind the scenes the client callbacks calls the XmlHttp object but in a different way as the request is still processed on the server side). The request is send using a HTML input button control. protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e) { // ......